Preview

Outsourcing in America

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
1347 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Outsourcing in America
Outsourcing is weakening the nation’s job-creation engine, and leaving thousands of newly unemployed workers here in the United States in search of work. With the number of companies outsourcing jobs continually increasing, it becomes a much larger issue for the U.S. workforce to find a job when so many are being outsourced overseas. Unfortunately this trend is likely to continue to cause serious harm in the United States if it continues to go unmonitored. Foreign and American governments have contributed to the problems caused by outsourcing in a number of ways. Some of the more visible ways are a lack of monitoring and data gathering, ceasing to enforce any pressure or penalties upon companies outsourcing jobs, and U.S. jobs being outsourced due to foreign incentives. These three issues are a large contributing factor to the current problem of outsourcing in the United States and its negative impact on the American workforce.

The U.S. federal and state governments are contributing to the problems created by outsourcing due to their lack of monitoring and data gathering on the number of jobs that are being exported. Without having the needed statistics on the number of jobs that are being exported, the full impact of job loss cannot be properly quantified. The U.S. Commerce and Labor Departments claim that the lack of monitoring system to record the number of outsourced jobs in America is due to a lack of resources. This thought process seems contradictory as the federal government spends over $130 billion each year on research and development, and a fraction of this spending would be enough to grasp the full scale of this outsourcing issue (52). This prevents any meaningful understanding for the U.S. people on the scale of jobs being outsourced, the business’s and occupations being affected by outsourcing, and the economy’s potential responses to the negative impacts of outsourcing. With the absence of this data, corporations are able to continue concealing

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Satisfactory Essays

    Outsourcing could potentially hinder a stable American economy’s workforce. Despite that prices for goods and products…

    • 412 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Recently, there have been many debates over the important issue on how companies and governments in the past decades have been increasingly sourcing a wide range of tasks to offshore sites. A group member of ours is an overseas buyer for his company. He is fortunate enough to experience what that is like firsthand. As a buyer, he is required to travel to different countries where large labor and talent pools are available at lower costs to try to procure goods and services at the lowest price, in order to help his company reach higher profits. Many Americans believe that outsourcing is one of the main reasons that the unemployment rate has been increasing in the United States, so they complain and publicly criticize the companies and governments who outsource jobs abroad. Also many U.S. workers (from white- collar well educated individuals to semi-skilled workers) have become more concerned about the security of their jobs due to increasing global economic integration since the early 2000s.…

    • 3058 Words
    • 88 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Better Essays

    In the United States volumes of research have been conducted with a range of 300,000 to a projected 1.4 million will be lost to outsourcing. However, the research cannot identify the exact amount of jobs lost to outsourcing or natural progression and technology advancements (Gorg & Hanley, 2004).…

    • 2422 Words
    • 10 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    As the problem of job outsourcing becomes more of an issue in politics, elected officials like the President and Congress will no longer be able to ignore the dilemma. The war in Iraq has been at the forefront of the presidential race but the importance of outsourcing American jobs seems to have been slightly overshadowed. If the issue of outsourcing is not watched carefully and a definitive plan hammered out, a trickling down of negative effects may occur within the U.S. economy. However, there is a polarized opinion on the effects of this "phenomenon".…

    • 1056 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Better Essays

    Abstract This article presents an overview of the offshoring of information technology (IT), especially software and IT-enabled services, and its impacts on American labor. Topics include the history of offshoring politics in the United States, differences in attitudes between politicians and economists in their attitudes about the severity of the offshoring “problem,” national differences in types of offshoring providers, technological and other drivers of offshoring, reasons to offshore, characteristics of work amenable to offshoring, the employment impact in the United States, political and educational responses to offshoring in the United States, and the roles of labor unions and big business. Keywords offshoring, information technology, educational responses, political responses, labor This article addresses the offshoring of information technology (IT), especially software and IT-enabled…

    • 10332 Words
    • 42 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Another overwhelming problem in today’s society is the outsourcing of jobs. Outsourcing is when companies contract (work) out or abroad (Oxford Dictionary, outsourcing). To simplify this, it means sending jobs to other countries due to the labor costs being cheaper than it…

    • 1923 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    30 little turtles

    • 830 Words
    • 4 Pages

    What is outsourcing? Outsourcing is a practice used by many different companies to reduce costs by transferring portions of work to outside supplies rather than completing it internally. You may be asking yourself “why should I care”, “how does this have anything to do with me”. Well when you buy a new pre-paid cell phone, in order to activate it you must call the one eight hundred number on the back, should you be surprised to know that most of the respondent’s is of Indian ethnicity? In fact almost all of our technological based problems are solved by other ethnic based community’s. How does outsourcing affect the American people? Should we as a country support it?…

    • 830 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    As an American citizen, I initially believe that outsourcing is a terrible thing for America’s economy. When you hear about American jobs closing to be moved over overseas, it makes you worry about our already troubled economy. You become worried about all the employees who have been removed from their jobs. The government will provide a limited supply of unemployment pay, but they cannot guarantee all displaced employees’ their jobs back.…

    • 305 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Essay Offshoring

    • 1893 Words
    • 8 Pages

    These days we hear a lot about offshoring. But offshoring has become a hot topic that it was even discussed in the recent presidential debate. There are so many questions come to us when we talk about outsourcing. Sending jobs to countries who don’t ask for much is easier than paying Americans who ask for what will get them through the day. Workers in countries such as china and India are hard workers. Many people do not realize that outsourced jobs leave many Americans unemployed. Another problem is that we have more than Americans relying on us. Outsourcing affects everyone. That’s why many young Americans are going to other fields that are the less likely to be offshored. Information Technology jobs overseas also run a security and privacy risk. Risks such as these cause a negative impact on outsourcing.…

    • 1893 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Is Outsourcing Good

    • 693 Words
    • 3 Pages

    Outsourcing has been practice for decades, it happens when companies or business contract a third party, someone outside the business, to produce goods or provide services. Outsourcing can be local, within the same country or offshore, outside the country. Some of the job areas companies outsource are Accounting, Customer Services, Human Resources, Information and Technology and Payroll. Outsourcing supporters affirm that this activity provides substantial cost savings to businesses, through paying less to others do their job, at the same time they can lower prices of goods and services. Although outsourcing brings benefits to a company, this activity may limit the quality of products and the availability of…

    • 693 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Outsourcing is an issue that America is struggling with right now. Outsourcing is a process in which a corporation will send its business overseas… to lets say India, or China. The reason they do this is only because the cost of production and labor is astronomically lower than what it is here in the U.S. White collar jobs are the most affected by this, with engineering, architecture, and accounting to name a few being hit the hardest (Raynor 1). To be more specific middle class American 's are the ones that are facing this problem. Of course the overall impact of outsourcing does more than just affect the middle class; it runs much deeper into the nation 's economy. Debt among the public, corporate, and private worlds are higher than they ever have been before (Steingart 1). With the jobs being taken away from middle class citizens, they have less money and in turn less money is put into the economy. The impact of outsourcing is vast, and changes need to be made before there is no local economy or middle class America left.…

    • 1476 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    American Outsourcing

    • 1669 Words
    • 7 Pages

    Outsourcing jobs is a major epidemic facing the American people today, because it is leading to higher and higher unemployment. Many critics argue that outsourcing benefits the American majority because it makes the products purchased at home in America a lot cheaper than they would be. These cheaper prices are because the cost to produce the items is lower since the jobs were outsourced. “Cheaper prices for consumers goods is often the first thing cited when defending outsourcing” (Hargreaves). However, most people don’t see what the negative effects of outsourcing are. Katherine Paralta, part of U.S. News, acknowledges that many Americans lose their jobs from outsourcing, she later even went on to say that as many as “3.2 million Americans have lost their jobs since 2001” (Peralta). These people are then in need of jobs to support themselves and many cannot find these jobs. What Peralta is saying is that when companies outsource their productions to cheaper areas, they are laying off the American workers which causes these people to desperately need money…

    • 1669 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Why America

    • 496 Words
    • 2 Pages

    While the figure of jobless in the United States increases, the total count of jobs available in the nation decreases due to outsourcing of jobs to overseas countries that provide cheaper labor. All major corporations are continually looking for the easiest, cheapest, and quickest way to finish their products. These cheap sources of labor are currently coming from India and China. In a research performed on outsourcing by Working America, “Manufacturing employment collapsed from a high of 19.5 million workers in June 1979 to 11.5 workers in December 2009, a…

    • 496 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Many American companies that are outsourcing jobs to other countries create a problem in the economy of the Unites States and also creates a cultural effect in a global scale. To this day, The United States had lost millions of manufacturing jobs compared to two decades ago (Heffner, 2012). Americans can no longer compete to international manufacturers, which put the United States economy in doom. There are many factors involved as to why American companies’ decides to do its manufacturing business outside of the United States. The most obvious reason is the cost of labor. International wages from third world countries cost way less than wages in the United States. For example, manufacturers in China get paid 33 cents an hour (Heffner, 2012). As a company, the cost of doing business outside of the Unites States is way cheaper than hiring workers in the United States, which would cost more than 20 folds. In addition to wages, outsourcing jobs outside of the United States would also save companies cost for payroll taxes, benefits, and dealing with unions that are common in The United States.…

    • 1143 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    The US has an outsourcing problem, and this problem is at the core of the argument about free trade with China. Our free trade relationship is extraordinarily one-sided, with China exporting much more in goods to the US, than it imports. In 2001, China was accepted as a member of the World Trade Organization. Between the years of 2001 and 2006, an average of 353,000 US jobs were lost to China; mostly manufacturing positions. (Scott, 2007) When China trades internationally, other nations lose.…

    • 803 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays